


The Story Of A White Cravat

by Unsentimentalf



Category: The Complete Tales of Peter Rabbit and Friends - Beatrix Potter
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-31
Updated: 2021-02-05
Packaged: 2021-03-18 11:41:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,427
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29117670
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Unsentimentalf/pseuds/Unsentimentalf
Summary: Mrs Tiggy-winkle is collecting washing.
Kudos: 2





	1. Chapter 1

“He doesn’t even look like the Tom I married any more.”

“Oh yes,” she says, because she remembers how that felt. A pancake of prickles on the road, and she keeps counting; two bedsheets, six handkerchiefs,

She doesn’t remember much else. The wild snuffling of hedgehog sex, the pull of the little ones at her skirt, the feeling of desolation when they finally didn’t come back; that is all gone now, just the memory of a memory. But the flat, dusty mess of spikes and brown fur on the broken stone of the farm track- she remembers that.

The tortoiseshell and white cat only wants an audience for her grumblings. Her middle-aged and overweight ginger tom cat has been out on the tiles again, noisily raising Cain in the village and now everybody has a complaint to make to her. She, therefore, complains in turn to her captive audience, which is Mrs Tiggy-winkle returning her laundry. Mrs Tiggy-winkle fears that she will not get paid until the cat has finished her strident miaowing, though she is done with laying out the neatly ironed calicos and has other calls to make. 

“There were six little ginger bastards in the village last year! Six!” The cat hisses. “And their hussy mothers each paraded them past my door!”

There will be no ginger kittens in the village this year, bastard or legitimate. Mrs Tiggy-winkle hears all the gossip. The ginger male’s fighting and caterwauling is no more than an attempt to conjure up the memory of his old, unaltered self. The tortoiseshell and white cat would be mortified if she guessed that everyone knows that her Tom is no longer capable of performing, for her or any other puss. 

Find another one, Mrs Tiggy-winkle should perhaps advise, but she doesn’t give advice to her customers, especially not advice she hasn’t taken herself. There are advantages to being a widow and kittenless.

Eventually she receives her tarnished penny and can move on from the cottage garden halfway up the hillside. Into the woods; a rabbit thumps his foot at the noise she makes coming through the undergrowth, and the younglings scatter, but only for a second. The Flopsy brood, grown now and still wild mannered. It is not often that their grey jackets come to her to be washed and when they do they are torn and thick with sandy mud and she charges extra. 

Now they are running round her, flashing off-white tails and kicking hind legs too close for comfort. Her prickles flare but otherwise she ignores them. With a little relief she reaches the entrance to the sandy burrow and knocks politely. The young rabbits dash off into the bushes before their grandmother can appear.

Old Mrs Rabbit invites her in for tea. They walk through the parlour, where Mrs Rabbit’s son-in-law is snoring in an armchair. He is starting to look the spitting image of his late father, but Old Benjamin Bunny would never have let his children run wild. Mrs Tiggy-winkle doesn’t ask why he is sleeping in his mother-in-law’s burrow rather than his own home. She has never really approved of rabbit behaviour, though Old Mrs Rabbit is always civil to her and the cup of tea is welcome. 

They sit on a cushioned bench near the hearth and while the kettle heats on the hob they talk about the local happenings. For Mrs Tiggy-winkle, as for Old Mrs Rabbit, their locality is the farmyard, the cottage gardens, the hillside and the wood. The village is further than she has ever been, though like her mother and grandmother before her she buys all her washing supplies from the shop there. Every month she sends a tiny note, in tinier curvy handwriting, with six pennies, or a silver sixpence if she has one, with Betsy, the noisy but reliable wood pigeon, and every month the carter drops off a very small package behind the farm gatepost with starch and washing powder and materials for darning and everything else that she might need all wrapped in neat brown paper and very thin string.

The birds go furthest; not the sparrows and the blue tits, maybe, but the pigeons and the seagulls and the kestrel all fly far beyond her imagining, further than the village, even. The swallows and the cuckoos that makes the wood noisy every summer go somewhere else entirely in winter, while she sleeps and wakes and sleeps again, but Mrs Tiggy-winkle has never asked them where. 

There are animals and birds beyond count just in the places between which she scurries to collect washing, or to deliver it, or to find a tastier supper than the decaying logs near her little cottage dug in the earth can provide. The rest of the world is not her concern. Some of her children went there, looking for places where they could live on their own, and then they did not come back.

The teacups are empty, and so is the blue and white teapot. It is time for her to start on the long journey from the wood to the farmyard. She will go along the sheep trails, through the heather and the sparse grass, zigzagging down and further down through the near silence of the hillside, only broken by the bleating of the half-grown lambs.

But as she pushes her way through the brambles edging the trees, she hears a sharp, familiar bark. “Mrs Tiggy-winkle!”

She resists the impulse to curl into a ball and turns instead. 

“And where are you going to on this fine evening?”

“If you please, Sir, I’m off to the farmyard to pick up the washing.”

“The farmyard?” A long, long pink tongue extends to curl around the pointed snout. “How pleasant. In that case perhaps you could do something for me?”

Mrs Tiggy-winkle doesn’t want to do anything for Mr Tod. He sees her hesitation and he laughs. 

“Don’t you want to be useful, busy little hedgehog? You’re looking very plump today.”

Mr Tod does not look plump. He looks skinny and there are grey hairs round his snout and a patch of what might be mange on his calf. Every year the new young adults are finding their own territories, to the north and the south and the east and the west, and every year Mr Tod finds himself hunting in a smaller space. 

Mr Tod may be desperate enough for dinner to risk spines in his nose and paws. Mrs Tiggy-winkle shudders. “If you please Sir, I could starch the tip of your tail and your fine white cravat until they gleam in the moonlight.”

“Why would l want to shine in the dark?” he asks. “I prefer to go unobserved. No, Mrs Tiggy-winkle, I have no use for your washing.”

Indeed, the smell of unwashed fox is heavy in the small glade. Mr Tod is what folk call a confirmed bachelor and these days the state of his dress shows it. Nobody can remember at time when there was a Mrs Tod, or cubs, or if there ever had been. Mrs Tiggy-winkle wants to curl as tight as possible but she stands, a little bent over as always, the bundle of dirty washing across her shoulder, and she says nothing.

“Now,” Mr Tod says, grinning, and he unties the cravat from around his neck. “This is a present, for the most handsome goose in the farmyard. You are going to deliver it for me.”

Mrs Tiggy-winkle blinks at him, completely confused.

“Take this.” He pushes it into her paw. “And don’t put holes in it.”

She clutches the dirty white cloth to her chest, still blinking at him.

He sighs. “Go to the farmyard. Tell the geese that this is a present for the most handsome goose of all. Give it to them. Leave. Do you understand?”

“No,” she thinks. But she doesn’t dare say so. “Farmyard.,” she says in a small voice. “Goose. Present.” 

“Exactly. I’ll be watching from the hillside. Leave the washing, stupid woman! You can come back for it. Go!”

She runs as fast as her little brown legs will take her, all the way down the hill to the side gate and into the farmyard, startling the hens who flap and cluck. “Help! Help! Murder! Fire! Flood! Help!”

They settle as they always do after a minute of running around and squawking, and Sally Henny-Penny struts over to Mrs Tiggy-winkle as if nothing has agitated her. “Dear Mrs Tiggy-winkle. How punctual you are. I shall bring my stockings straight away.”

Mrs Tiggy-winkle nods, nervously. The geese are around the pond, pecking at the few bits of grass growing in the mud. She sniffs the air, but the scent of fox on the cloth in her paw is too strong for her to tell whether Mr Tod is close.

It’s only a present. Everybody likes presents, or at least she thinks they do, though it is a long time since anyone has given her anything that they did not want back washed and ironed. She shuffles over towards the huge white birds. “Excuse me, Sirs and Ma’ams.”

They lift their heads and come towards her, chattering to each other. She has never talked to the geese before. They keep their own white coats meticulously clean. She looks at the off-white rag in her paw and wonders if they will be most terribly insulted. It doesn’t matter. Geese can’t eat her. 

“The fox,” she says to the first goose to reach her. “Mr Tod. He told me,” she takes a breath. “He told me to give this to the most handsome goose. I could clean and starch it for you if you like.” 

The lead goose throws his head back. “Mine!” he honks proudly, and his beak comes out to snatch it from her paw.

“Mine!” honks the goose next to him and the next “Mine!” All six of them are now flapping around the farmyard, tussling over the cravat, pulling it from beak to beak and honking to the skies. 

Mrs Tiggy-winkle scurries out of the way of the huge wings and clumsy feet. She finds herself trapped up against the fence as Kep the collie dog, comes racing from the barn to see what all the fuss is about. 

“Fox!” he barks and charges into the middle of the geese. There is a long and confused scuffle, by the end of which Kep has the shredded cravat between his sharp teeth and the geese have retreated, complaining bitterly about the loss of the prize and preening their disarrayed feathers. 

Now that the geese are quieter, the shrieking of the hens can be heard. “Fox! Fox! Fox!” But by the time that Kep has run through the side gate and up the hillside, Mr Tod is gone, and so is Mirabelle, the fat speckled pullet. 

Nobody will want to sort out laundry now, so Mrs Tiggy-winkle leaves quietly. She will pick up the farmyard washing tomorrow, she tells herself. Slowly she climbs back up the hill to her abandoned bundle, and then along to her little home in the side of the hill. There, she closes and bolts the door, makes herself tea and warms up a beetle pasty for supper, and then takes off her cap, apron, gown and striped petticoat and curls up, rather tighter than usual, in her soft bed of last year’s leaves.


	2. Over The Hill

Mrs Tiggy-winkle wakes up in the comforting dark of her burrow.

For a moment everything is all right, and then she remembers the farmyard. They wouldn’t blame her, surely? Surely they wouldn’t? But she pictures Kep’s white teeth and she knows that she cannot go back.

She dresses as she always does, lights the fire and sets the kettle on the hearth. After a cup of tea to steady her nerves, she goes to the farthest part of her little home and digs up the store of coins there. Twenty-three pennies, two sixpences and a shilling. It’s a great deal of money for a humble washerwoman, but she has always been careful.

She comes back past the clothes drying on the indoor racks. A little paw reaches out to caress the soft velvet jacket belonging to Digory Delvet, the fine lace tablecloth of Mrs Tabita Twitchet that had to come all the way from the village by carrier pigeon because Mrs Twitchet declares that nobody else but Mrs Tiggy-winkle would do, and reluctantly leaves them there. She finds that she has no qualms about stealing from her customers but she doesn’t want anyone to have a reason to come after her.

The pattered rug in front of the hearth catches her gaze. Slightly worn but like everything else, spotlessly clean. The hoglets used to play on it, wrestling and squeaking, while she sat in the rocking chair knitting multiple little sets of hats and mittens so that when their eyes were open she could take them for a walk around the neighbourhood without disgrace.

Mr Tiggy-winkle had not been fond of having kittens in the house. He enjoyed boasting about how strong and healthy they were to his friends, but he was never around when she needed a hand with them, only coming home when his supper was ready. 

She had loved her children, she supposed. A mother had to, didn’t she? But they had grown so fast and had left without a backwards look. Not one of them wanted to learn the trade she’d learned from her mother and from her grandmother before her. When she’d found what the cart wheel had left of Mr Tiggy-winkle, her first thought had been “no more hoglets”, and her second, appalling, thought, had been “good”. 

Since then she has lived in her cosy house in the side of the hill on her own, and now someone else will live there, because homes don’t stay empty for long. She clasps her tiny hands together and hopes that it will be a clean animal. Someone who will take care with the best china on the Welsh dresser, keep the chimney swept and the door hinges oiled, who will hang the rug up and beat it four times a year and who will clear out the bedding in autumn and replace it with dry, crisp leaves.

Mrs Tiggy-winkle packs a large bundle. She has been carrying washing every day of her adult life and her thin arms and legs are strong. Starch and washing powder, darning needles and thread, brushes, pegs and a coiled line, even her three flatirons, heavy but they are the tools of her trade and without that what is she? She can’t take her solid oak washtub but her coins should buy another from a cooper and until then there are streams.

She feels a twinge of guilt as she looks at the pile of washing next to the tub, but she hasn’t been paid for it. The fire has burned down while she packed, and now she digs up a heap of earth to throw over it and watches it sizzle and die. That’s the end, now the fire is out. She is no longer home. She no longer has a home. 

She stands, finally, in the front room, indecisive. She could prop the door open with a stone so that her customers could collect their belongings, but there are people on the hillside, in the wood and even in the farmyard who will take what is not theirs. She thinks about leaving the key with the field mice. They will not know or care what happened in the farmyard; their worlds are measured from one grassy tussock to another and they have never met a goose or a dog though they all know of Mr Tod. But, friendly though they are, they are deeply unreliable, and have a habit of getting eaten between one day and the next. No, the mice are entirely unsuitable.

She glances back, remembering the velvet black coat hanging on the racks. It doesn’t need ironing; it is always perfectly smooth. Diggory Delvet does not care two figs about the doings of the overground world. There is a back door to his endless, intricate burrows not far from here. He will be asleep, but she can wake him, return his clean jacket and ask him to pass on her key to a suitable tenant in lieu of the penny for the washing that she will not ask for.

Sunset comes early on the east-facing hillside. The sun disappears long before the light fades. Mrs Tiggy-Winkle doesn’t want to travel by day, but she doesn’t want to meet her evening neighbours either. A few minutes after the sun disappears she’s knocking on the concealed back door.

She has to knock several times before the door opens to blinking, unfocused eyes and a long nose searching the air.

“Mrs Tiggy-winkle. Come in, you’re letting the light in.”

She bows her head and squeezes with some difficult into his tool room, full of spades and timbers, awls and hammers. The walls, floor and ceiling ae rough dirt, unlke her own whitewashed home. As she manages to close the small door behind her the front end of an earthworm pops out from the roof and before she can react Diggory has snaffled it up and it is gone. Mrs Tiggy-winkle feels suddenly ravenous. She has been too nervous to eat since she woke up.

Diggory says “You are very early, Mrs Tiggy-winkle, and at my back door.” 

“If you please” Mrs Tiggy-winkle says, “I am leaving today. Now.” She smooths the jacket and passes it to him. “I would be very grateful, Mr Diggory, if you could hold my door key for a while.”

Hedgehogs can see very well in the near darkness, as long as things are not too far away. She watches Diggory Delvet’s pink nose dance patterns in the air as he thinks, like a mayfly. 

“For how long should I hold it?”

“Until you find somebody who you might care to have as a neighbour,” Mrs Tiggy-winkle says. “I would not like just anybody moving into my house. 

The nose wriggles again. The mole clasps his huge pink hands together, thinking. 

“Annette Nadder is looking for a home,” he says finally. “She is far too lazy to dig one for herself and besides, she has no hands or feet. She has the impolite habit of coming into my house uninvited, and last month she left her old skin in my pantry. It took me days to clean it out again. I would not like to have Annette Nadder for my neighbour.”

His fingers reach out and envelop the tiny brass key. “Where are you going to, Mrs Tiggy-winkle?”

To the left is the woods. To the right are the cottages. Down the hillside is the farmyard. “Over the hill,“ Mrs Tiggy-winkle says, “and far away.”

The hill is steep and seemingly endless. Mrs Tiggy-winkle has never climbed further than a few feet above her chimney pot before. Nor have most of the animals she knows. Only the birds fly this high, and everyone knows that the birds talk such nonsense. 

She climbs slowly and with care. When she hears the rough tearing sound of the sheep grazing on the thin grass she goes well around them. What the sheep know tonight, the sheepdog will know by morning and she does not want Kep to follow her with his strong fast legs and his keen nose. 

After a couple of hours she reaches a stone wall blocking her way. It is too high for her to clamber over but she finds a place where a rain- borne stream has worn a path underneath it and she squeezes through and carries on upwards. 

In the moonlight there is the cry of the tawny owl above her. She is not frightened of Old Mr Brown. He eats mainly mice and voles, and she is quite prickly. Still, she curls a little as he descends to swoop silently over her head. She is sure that he recognises her but Old Mr Brown does not talk to anybody.

The night darkens, and it starts to rain. Mrs Tiggy-winkle is very tired and hungry. She finds an outcrop on the high moor and she digs a small scrape under a fallen stone. In the dryish earth she unpacks the bread and cheese brought from her well stocked pantry, eats, and tries not to think of her lovely comfortable leaf-fall bed. After a while she falls asleep.


End file.
